A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL.In "All Kinds of Proof," a down-and-out drunk makes the unlikeliest of friends when he is hired to train a mail-carrying robot; in "Blood Memory," a mother confronts the dangerous reality that her daughter will never assimilate in this world after she was the first child born through a teleportation device; in "The Blue Afternoon That Lasted Forever," a physicist rushes home to be with his daughter after he hears reports of an atmospheric anomaly which he knows to be a sign of the end of the earth; in "Miss Gloria," a robot comes back to life in many different forms in a quest to save a young girl. Guardian Angels and Other Monsters displays the depth and breadth of Daniel H. Wilson's vision and examines how artificial intelligence both saves and destroys humanity.

    Forty stories. On May 25, 1977, the world was introduced to Han, Luke, Leia, a pair of droids, a Wookiee, an old wizard, a villain in black, and a galaxy full of possibilities. Forty years on, Star Wars remains an unparalleled cultural phenomenon, having inspired and influenced generations of fans and creators. Decades of rich storytelling were sparked by one film, in part because the Star Wars galaxy feels alive. Strange and wonderful characters fill the edges of the screen and make us wonder:What are their stories?This unique anthology celebrates that legacy, as more than forty contributors lend their vision to this retelling of the original Star Wars film. Each of the forty stories reimagines a moment from the film through the eyes of a supporting character. From A Certain Point of View features contributions by bestselling authors, trendsetting artists, and treasured voices from the literary history of Star Wars:- Gary Whitta bridges the gap from Rogue One to A New Hope through the eyes of Captain Antilles.- Aunt Beru finds her voice in an intimate character study by Meg Cabot.- Nnedi Okorafor brings dignity and depth to a most unlikely character: the monster in the trash compactor.- Pablo Hidalgo provides a chilling glimpse inside the mind of Grand Moff Tarkin.- Wil Wheaton spins a poignant tale of the rebels left behind on Yavin.- Plus thirty-five more hilarious, heartbreaking, and astonishing tales.Experience the story of Star Wars from a whole new point of view.

    No one could have envisioned that this modest book would be the beginning of a fantasy career that would span decades and more than a hundred novels, with no signs of slowing yet. And among Ms. Lackey's many novels, few are as critically-acclaimed and beloved as those of the Elemental Masters. The novels in this series are loosely based on classic fairy tales, and take place in a fantasy version of turn-of-the-century London, where magic is real and Elemental Masters control the powers of Fire, Water, Air and Earth. Now the voices of other authors join Mercedes Lackey to add their own special touches to this delightful alternate history, in a world where magic is always just around the corner...Fire-water / Samuel Conway --Fire song / Diana L. Paxson --Sails of the armada / Kristin Schwengel --The wild rogue / Fiona Patton --Feathers and foundations / Elizabeth A. Vaughan --Hearth and family / Dayle A. Dermatis --Secret friends / Louisa Swann --Fire's daughter / Elisabeth Waters --Picking up the pieces / Cedric Johnson --The price of family / Jennifer Brozek --Arms of the sea / Tanya Huff --London falling / Ben Ohlander --The king of the river rats / Michele Lang --Air of deception / Jody Lynn Nye --Fly or fall / Stephanie Shaver --Bone dance / Rosemary Edghill and Rebecca Fox --The flying contraption / Ron Collins --A peony amongst roses / Gail Sanders and Michael Z. Williamson --Into the woods / Mercedes Lackey

    We had beaten the common cold. But in doing so we created something new, something terrible that no one could stop. The infection spread, a man-made virus taking over bodies and minds, filling them with one, unstoppable command...FEED.Countdown"Everglades"San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California BrowncoatsHow Green This Land, How Blue This SeaThe Day the Dead Came to Show and TellPlease Do Not Taunt the OctopusAll the Pretty Little HorsesComing to You Live

    Including stories from the 1970s to the present day, the collection seeks to expand the conversation about feminism while engaging the reader in a wealth of imaginative ideas. Sisters of the Revolution seeks to expand the ideas of both contemporary fiction and feminism to new fronts.Contents:The forbidden words of Margaret A. / L. Timmel Duchamp --My flannel knickers / Leonora Carrington --The mothers of Shark Island / Kit Reed --The palm tree bandit / Nnedi Okorafor --The grammarian's five daughters / Eleanor Arnason --And Salome danced / Kelley Eskridge --The perfect married woman / Angélica Gorodischer --The glass bottle trick / Nalo Hopkinson --Their mother's tears : the fourth letter / Leena Krohn --The screwfly solution / James Tiptree, Jr. --Seven losses of na Re / Rose Lemberg --The evening and the morning and the night / Octavia E. Butler --The sleep of plants / Anne Richter --The men who live in trees / Kelly Barnhill --Tales from the breast / Hiromi Goto --The Fall River axe murders / Angela Carter --Love and sex among the invertebrates / Pat Murphy --When it changed / Joanna Russ --The woman who thought she was a planet / Vandana Singh --Gestella / Susan Palwick --Boys / Carol Emshwiller --Stable strategies for middle management / Eileen Gunn --Northern chess / Tanith Lee --Aunts / Karin Tidbeck --Sur / Ursula K. Le Guin --Fears / Pamela Sargent --Detours on the way to nothing / Rachel Swirsky --Thirteen ways of looking at space/time / Catherynne M. Valente --Home by the sea / Elisabeth Vonaburg.

    Each of the writers was asked to write a new story based on one of his or her most famous series. Stephen King tells a tale of Roland, the Gunslinger, in the world of The Dark Tower, in "The Little Sisters of Eluria."Terry Pratchett relates an amusing incident in Discworld, of a magical contest and the witch Granny Weatherwax, in "The Sea and Little Fishes"Terry Goodkind tells of the origin of the Border between realms in the world of The Sword of Truth, in "Debt of Bones."Orson Scott Card spins a yarn of Alvin and his apprentice from the Tales of Alvin Maker, in "Grinning Man."Robert Silverberg returns to Majipoor and to Lord Valentine's adventure in an ancient tomb, in "the Seventh Shrine."Ursual K. Le Guin adds a sequel to her famous books of Earthsea, portraying a woman who wants to learn magic, in "Dragonfly."Tad Williams tells a dark and enthralling story of a great and haunted castle in the age before Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, in "The Burning Man."George R.R. Martin sets his piece a generation before his epic, A Song of Ice and Fire, in the adventure of "The Hedge Knight."Ann McCaffrey, the poet of Pern, returns once again to her world of romance and adventure in "Runner of Pern."Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar Saga is the setting of the tale of "The Wood Boy."Robert Jordan, in "New Spring," tells of crucial events in the years leading up to The Wheel of Time, of the meeting of Lan and Moiraine and the beginning of the search for the child who must grow to lead in the Last Battle.

    Gone are the cartoon images of wizened gray-haired men in pointy caps creating magic with a wave of their wands. Today's wizards are more subtle in their powers, more discerning in their ways, and-in the hands of modern fantasists-more likely than ever to capture readers' imaginations.In Neil Gaiman's "The Witch's Headstone," a piece taken from his much-anticipated novel in progress, an eight-year-old boy learns the power of kindness from a long-dead sorceress. Only one woman possesses two kinds of magic-enough to unite two kingdoms-in Garth Nix's "Holly and Iron." Patricia A. McKillip's "Naming Day" gives a sorcery student a lesson in breaking the rules. And a famished dove spins a tale worthy of a meal, but perhaps not the truth, in "A Fowl Tale" by Eoin Colfer.

    LovecraftNew Tales of Terror!What would happen if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's peerless detective, Sherlock Holmes, and his allies were to find themselves faced with Lovecraftian mysteries whose solutions lay not only beyond the grasp of logic, but beyond sanity itself. In this collection of original tales, twenty of today's cutting-edge writers provide answers to that burning question.Contributors include Neil Gaiman, Brian Stableford, Poppy Z. Bright, Barbara Hambly, Steve Perry, and Caitlin R. Kierman. These and other masters of horror, mystery, fantasy and science fiction spin dark tales within a terrifyingly surreal universe.Includes the Hugo Award-winning story A Study in Emerald by Neil Gaiman.Cover design: David StevensonCover Illustration: John Jude Palencar

    Kiernan is one of dark fantasy and horror’s most acclaimed and influential short fiction writers. Her powerful, unexpected stories shatter morality, gender, and sexuality: a reporter is goaded by her toxic girlfriend into visiting sadistic art exhibits; a countess in a decaying movie theater is sated by her servants; a collector offers his greatest achievement to ensnare a musician who grieves for her missing sister.In this retrospective collection of her finest work—previously only available in limited editions—Kiernan cuts straight to the heart of the emotional truths we cannot ignore.

    "Robin Hobb" and "Megan Lindholm" are both pseudonyms used by California-born Margaret Ogden, who from 1983 to 1992, published exclusively as Lindholm. This generous, 400-page hardcover original brings together short stories and novellas penned under both authorial bylines. As Hobb herself notes, "their" writing and styles differ in significant ways. (P.S. This collection includes stories previously unpublished in the United States.)

    and The Witching Hour begins.It begins in our time with a rescue at sea.  Rowan Mayfair, a beautiful woman, a brilliant practitioner of neurosurgery—aware that she has special powers but unaware that she comes from an ancient line of witches—finds the drowned body of a man off the coast of California and brings him to life.  He is Michael Curry, who was born in New Orleans and orphaned in childhood by fire on Christmas Eve, who pulled himself up from poverty, and who now, in his brief interval of death, has acquired a sensory power that mystifies and frightens him.As these two, fiercely drawn to each other, fall in love and—in passionate alliance—set out to solve the mystery of her past and his unwelcome gift, the novel moves backward and forward in time from today's New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and a château in the France of Louis XIV.  An intricate tale of evil unfolds—an evil unleashed in seventeenth-century Scotland, where the first "witch," Suzanne of the Mayfair, conjures up the spirit she names Lasher... a creation that spells her own destruction and torments each of her descendants in turn.From the coffee plantations of Port au Prince, where the great Mayfair fortune is made and the legacy of their dark power is almost destroyed, to Civil War New Orleans, as Julien—the clan's only male to be endowed with occult powers—provides for the dynasty its foothold in America, the dark, luminous story encompasses dramas of seduction and death, episodes of tenderness and healing.  And always—through peril and escape, tension and release—there swirl around us the echoes of eternal war: innocence versus the corruption of the spirit, sanity against madness, life against death.  With a dreamlike power, the novel draws us, through circuitous, twilight paths, to the present and Rowan's increasingly inspired and risky moves in the merciless game that binds her to her heritage. And in New Orleans, on Christmas Eve, this strangest of family sagas is brought to its startling climax.

    In "Selected Stories," thirteen of Sturgeon's very best tales have been gathered into one collection: Here are stories of love and darkness, transcendence and obsession, alien contact and human interaction. In the devastating wake of a nuclear holocaust, an actress performs her swan song before a small audience of survivors. A machine is possessed and intent upon destruction. Humankind's place in the vast cosmos is explored, as is the strange humanity of evil. In the author's acclaimed story "The Man Who Lost the Sea," a life is reconstructed in bizarre shattered fragments. And in "Slow Sculpture," Sturgeon's award-winning classic, a breast cancer patient surrenders to a healer's most unorthodox methods. Lyrical, often witty, frequently provocative, and always surprising, "Selected Stories" covers a wide range of human and inhuman emotion and experience, deftly traversing the borders between science fiction, dark fantasy, and horror. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Theodore Sturgeon including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the University of Kansas's Kenneth Spencer Research Library and the author's estate, among other sources.

    Blaylock"The Giving Mouth" by Ian R. MacLeod "A Sun in the Attic" by Mary Gentle "The God-Clown is Near" by Jay Lake"The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down: A Dime Novel" by Joe R. Lansdale"The Selene Gardening Society" by Molly Brown"Seventy-Two Letters" by Ted Chiang"The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance" by Michael Chabon"Victoria" by Paul Di Filippo"Reflected Light" by Rachel E. Pollock"Minutes of the Last Meeting" by Stepan Chapman"Excerpt from the Third and Last Volume of Tribes of the Pacific Coast" by Neal Stephenson"The Steam-Driven Time Machine: A Pop Culture Survey" by Rick Klaw"The Essential Sequential Steampunk: A Modest Survey of the Genre within the Comic Book Medium" by Bill Baker

    Revisions from the author's notes are included, allowing a deeper view into her world and a better understanding of her work. The Nebula Award–winning short story Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death, the Hugo Award–winning novella The Girl Who Was Plugged In, and the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning novella Houston, Houston, Do You Read? are included.The stories of Alice Sheldon, who wrote as James Tiptree Jr. ( Up the Walls of the World ) until her death in 1987, have been heretofore available mostly in out-of-print collections. Thus the 18 accomplished stories here will be welcomed by new readers and old fans. ''The Screwfly Solution'' describes a chilling, elegant answer to the population problem. In ''Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death,'' the title tells the tale--species survival insured by imprinted drives--but the story's force is in its exquisite, lyrical prose and its suggestion that personal uniqueness is possible even within biological imperatives. ''The Girl Who Was Plugged In'' is a future boy-meets-girl story with a twist unexpected by the players. ''The Women Men Don't See '' displays Tiptree's keen insight and ability to depict singularity within the ordinary. In Hugo and Nebula award-winning ''Houston, Houston, Do You Read?'' astronauts flying by the sun slip forward 500 years and encounter a culture that successfully questions gender roles in ours.ContentsIntroduction by Michael SwanwickThe Last Flight of Doctor Ain (1969)The Screwfly Solution (1977)And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side (1972)The Girl Who Was Plugged In (1973)The Man Who Walked Home (1972)And I Have Come Upon This Place by Lost Ways (1972)The Women Men Don’t See (1973)Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light! (1976)Houston, Houston, Do You Read? (1976)With Delicate Mad Hands (1981)A Momentary Taste of Being (1975)We Who Stole the Dream (1978)Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (1974)Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death (1973)On the Last Afternoon (1972)She Waits for All Men Born (1976)Slow Music (1980)And So On, and So On (1971)

    From Sir Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene" to E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops", literature is filled with sexy, deadly, and downright twisted tales. In this collection, today's most acclaimed award-winning and bestselling authors reimagine their favorite classic stories and use their own unique styles to rebuild these timeless stories, the ones that have inspired, awed, and enraged them, the ones that have become ingrained in modern culture, and the ones that have been too long overlooked. They take these twelve stories and boil them down to their bones, and reassemble them for a new generation of readers. Written from a twenty-first century perspective and set within the realms of science fiction, dystopian fiction, fantasy, and realistic fiction, these short stories are as moving and thought provoking as their originators. They pay homage to groundbreaking literary achievements of the past while celebrating each author's unique perception and innovative style.Contents:Introduction: Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales (2013) • essay by Tim Pratt and Melissa MarrThat the Machine May Progress Eternally (2013) / shortfiction by Carrie Ryan, inspired by E.M. Forster's The Machine StopsThe King of Elfland's Daughter (2013) • interior artwork by Charles VessLosing Her Divinity [Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz] (2013) / shortfiction by Garth Nix, inspired by The Man Who Would Be KingThe Sleeper and the Spindle (2013) / novelette by Neil Gaiman, inspired by Sleeping BeautyKai Lung's Golden Hours (2013) • interior artwork by Charles VessThe Cold Corner (2013) / shortfiction by Tim Pratt, inspired by Henry James' The Jolly CornerMillcara (2013) / shortfiction by Holly Black, inspired by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's CarmillaFigures of Earth (2013) • interior artwork by Charles VessWhen First We Were Gods (2013) / shortfiction by Rick Yancey, inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne's The BirthmarkSirocco (2013) / shortfiction by Margaret Stohl, inspired by Horace Walpole's The Castle of OtrantoThe Shaving of Shagpat (2013) • interior artwork by Charles VessAwakened (2013) / shortfiction by Melissa Marr, inspired by Kate Chopin's The AwakeningNew Chicago (2013) / shortfiction by Kelley Armstrong, inspired by W. W. Jacob's The Monkey's PawThe Wood Beyond the World (2013) • interior artwork by Charles VessThe Soul Collector (2013) / shortfiction by Kami Garcia, inspired by the Brothers Grimm's RumpelstiltskinWithout Faith, Without Law, Without Joy (2013) / shortfiction by Saladin Ahmed, inspired by Sir Edmund Spenser's Faerie QueeneGoblin Market (2013) • interior artwork by Charles VessUncaged (2013) / shortfiction by Gene Wolf, inspired by William Seabrook's The Caged White Werewolf..